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PLAY VIDEOJanuary 22, 2018I spent October-December 2017 working at McMurdo Station, Antarctica supporting a team based out of the University of Oregon. The team included divers who installed highly sensitive monitoring instruments on the sea floor with live connections back to the surface. My role was to integrate, archive, and make available the... -
PLAY VIDEOFebruary 2, 2017I write a lot of spatial data analysis code using ArcGIS’s Python package, arcpy. Sometimes we need to automate map generation as part of that work, but with the split of the arcpy.mapping library between ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro, developers had to target two different APIs in order to make... -
PLAY VIDEOJuly 29, 2016I did all of the programming, GIS, and statistical modelling for a multi-phase National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project to determine mitigation potential for flooding in small midwestern towns. The picture above is from a mockup of an interface we designed to allow town governments to use our tool to... -
PLAY VIDEOFebruary 27, 2015This slideshow requires JavaScript. PISCES is a set of ArcGIS tools and data for managing and analyzing the ranges of California’s 133 native fish taxa. Data is stored as a standard relational database, increasing the power over many typical GIS approaches, and allowing for a powerful mapping component that summarizes species... -
PLAY VIDEONovember 27, 2014ArcGIS provides powerful geoprocessing and data manipulation tools in Python, but provides no programmatic access to metadata from the language, meaning that once data is processed, information on the workflow used can’t be attached to the results. To remedy this so that code that produces large numbers of resulting spatial... -
PLAY VIDEOFebruary 20, 2014As part of the organization I started, Environmental Consumer, I built an application to help individuals reduce their time in the shower as part of a hackathon in early 2014. Designed specifically for mobile devices, the application lets you start and stop a timer, accounts for time to dry off,... -
PLAY VIDEOSeptember 30, 2013http://nicksantos.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/rim_fire.mp4 The UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences has long term study sites at the confluence of the Tuolumne and Clavey rivers, near where the Rim Fire of 2013 started. As part of these long term study sites, we captured a gigapixel image of the confluence in June 2013. Center staff... -
PLAY VIDEODecember 10, 2012At a hackathon I helped put on in 2012, I wrote a Python wrapper for USGS’ water data for the nation flow data API that provides native Python objects based on requests for water flow data at USGS gage locations. While the wrapper still works, today, I recommend people use... -
PLAY VIDEONovember 2, 2012During the 2012 election cycle, I was a fellow with the Roosevelt Institute’s Pipeline program – as part of this fellowship, I built a web application to show electoral support for climate change action to show that climate is an “election issue”. The application allowed visitors to search for their... -
PLAY VIDEOOctober 30, 2012For our Sierra Nevada Meadows Database project that catalogued more than 17,000 meadows in the Sierra Nevada, I built two pieces of software that extracted environmental parameters relevant to each meadow. The software: Determined the outlet point of each meadow Delineated a catchment for each meadow based on the outlet point Extracted data... -
PLAY VIDEOSeptember 29, 2012Time Lapse Hydrography – Tuolumne and Clavey Rivers 2012 with Temperatures from Center for Watershed Sciences on Vimeo. Our office put out time lapse cameras and data loggers on many rivers in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains in an attempt to capture what flows result in what types of amphibian habitat,...
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PLAY VIDEOJuly 3, 2011One major barrier to more effective recycling is consumer confusion on what can be recycled in their bins at home. With Environmental Consumer, I set out to build a database of recycling information for cities in the United States. We started with the top 25 cities by population in the...
Software and Code
I love creating tools with code – web applications, decision support systems, GIS workflows, and scientific models. The projects shown here are just some of the many that I’ve worked on.
Preferred Languages, Frameworks, and Databases
- Python
- Django
- Django REST Framework
- HTML/CSS/Preprocessors
- Javascript
- Vue.js
- PostgreSQL/PostGIS
- R
- Perl
Other Languages and Tools I’ve worked in
- PHP
- C/C++
- Lua
- MySQL